One day, you'll turn on your computer and hear a click-click-click, and then panic will set in when you realize your treasured pictures, music, and documents are lost. Hopefully your worries will subside when you remember you've backed up your data regularly, and you're only facing the minor annoyance of a restore.
It has finally become common knowledge that hard drives can fail over time. (It's not quite to the "will fail over time" point, but it's progress.) And naturally, it's almost always difficult to predict when hard drive failures will happen. Drives can fail after 1 day, 1 month, 1 year, or 1 decade. This is why backups - and more importantly, regular backups - are so important.
As a starting point, you should choose a reputable manufacturer (I prefer Seagate, although Western Digital has started improving again). Then settle on a backup device - an external drive, an additional internal drive, a server (with its own backup system), or something else. Then you need to choose software to manage your backups.
As the name suggests, SyncBack handles both synchronization and backup jobs, but it is really best suited for backups. In expert mode it is extremely flexible with support for compression, network and FTP backups, and a lot more; for the best synchronizing, check out FreeFileSync.
2BrightSparks has an excellent, unrestricted product in it's freeware version of SyncBack, but they downplay just how good it really is to try and get you to consider one of their commercial products with extended features (SyncBackSE and SyncBackPro). Whether those features justify the cost is up to you.
Download latest version:
SyncBack v3.2.20.0
| Homepage: | http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/ |
| Supported OS: |  |
| Portable version: |  (Unofficial) |
| 64-bit version: | |
| Active project: |  |
| No strings attached **: | |
** No spyware, ads, nags, registration reminders, etc.
Other Backup freeware to keep an eye on:
